The present invention relates to a structural assembly having vertically extending columns and wall panels extending between the columns, and more particularly, wherein at least two wall panels extend between adjacent columns and the wall panels are joined to each other to form a structural wall assembly between adjacent columns.
The structural assembly of the present invention may be used for many different buildings, including electronically invisible structures, but is mainly designed to be utilized in a cooling tower or similar arrangement wherein air is drawn under said wall panels and then upward across a fill assembly to, both by direct contact and evaporation, cool a liquid, usually water, which is sprayed downwardly across a fill assembly. Because it is a goal of the present invention to provide a lightweight structural assembly, the fill associated with the structural assembly cooling tower of the present invention would usually comprise generally vertical parallel sheets of a plastic material such as polyvinyl chloride placed in a packed arrangement beneath the water spray headers.
Most cooling towers utilize a structural assembly to resist wind loads and earthquake loads and support dead and live loads, and as support of air moving equipment such as a fan, motor, gearbox and drive shaft or coupling and liquid distribution equipment such as distribution headers and spray nozzles and a heat transfer surface media such as a fill assembly. Due to the corrosive nature of the great volumes of air and water drawn through such cooling towers, it has been the past practice to either assemble such towers of stainless steel or galvanized and coated metal or, for larger field assembled towers, to construct such cooling towers of wood, which is chemically treated under pressure, and/or concrete at least for the structure of the tower. As mentioned above, metal parts of such cooling towers are subject to corrosion at varying degrees depending on the actual metal utilized and the coating material used to protect the metal. Further, such metal towers are usually limited in size and also somewhat expensive, especially in very large applications such as to cool water from an electric power generating station condenser. Pressure treated wood structure towers themselves are less expensive than metal or reinforced concrete towers, but may require extensive fire protection systems and have limits on their projected useful lives, due to a variety of decaying processes.
A cooling tower utilizing plastic structural elements is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,028,357, assigned to the assignee of the present application. That patent discloses a cooling tower comprised of structural plastic and fiberglass composite elements with a central structural hot water inlet main riser pipe.